Kernel Space: On-Demand readahead
Jun 01, 2007, 06:45 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Jonathan Corbet)
"'Readahead' is the act of speculatively reading a portion of a
file's contents into memory in the expectation that a process
working with that file will soon want that data. When readahead
works well, a data-consuming process will find that the information
it needs is available to it when it asks, and that waiting for disk
I/O is not necessary. The Linux kernel has done readahead for a
long time, but that does not mean that it cannot be done better. To
that end, Fengguang Wu has been working on a set of 'adaptive
readahead' patches for a couple of years..."
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